


the side effects of eating too many clementines

by joldiego



Series: you will know love by its fruit [2]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Grief/Mourning, M/M, POV Patty Uris, POV Richie Tozier, author has an unhealthy fixation on poetry about fruit, but all will be fixed !!! just not in this one, on god Patty and Stan are gonna reunite soon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22489186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joldiego/pseuds/joldiego
Summary: There are a box of clementinesin the kitchen and the thing is thatI love you again. The thing is thatI love what orange tastes like soI eat too much of it and end up sick.Patty and Richie grieve.Both a prequel and an interlude to the mind's a funny fruit.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris
Series: you will know love by its fruit [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1570243
Comments: 50
Kudos: 395





	the side effects of eating too many clementines

**Author's Note:**

> we're back! this fic is very heavily based around the poem The Side Effects of Eating Too Many Clementines by Alessia Di Cesare.  
> You don't necessarily _have_ to read the mind's a funny fruit before you read this one (or even read it at all) because this is a sort of prequel, but I would _reccommend_ it ;)
> 
> warnings for this fic include: grief/mourning, disordered eating, discussions of character death, discussions of suicide, discussions of mental illness, imagery involving blood, discussion of drug addiction. please practice self-care when reading, this one is pretty heavy.

_There are a box of clementines  
in the kitchen and the thing is that  
I love you again. The thing is that  
I love what orange tastes like so  
I eat too much of it and end up sick._

* * *

It’s been a month since the shiva candle burnt out.

So, it’s been a month and a week since It happened.

That’s the name that Patty’s given to what happened that night. _It._ She turns it into a proper noun and feels as if it carries the appropriate weight. Well, that and… the other It. The one shakily traced onto the bathroom tile in bright crimson.

Everything had been bright crimson. The water. The tub. The floor. Him.

(She hasn’t been able to paint in red since. She assigned her students to paint ocean scenes and all of her cardinals have been a sunny shade of orange. Stan told her once that some cardinals turn orange when they aren’t eating a proper diet. He remembers spotting a few as a child up in Maine.)

_(Remembered,_ she means.)

Patty doesn’t know who cleaned it up. She assumes that Maureen must have called someone, or snuck away at some point to do it herself. She can’t remember what she said to her sister, vaguely catatonic as she stammered through an explanation over the phone after Stan had been whisked away on a stretcher. Her body hunched and rigid, teeth clenched to tamp down on the urge to scream. Eyes screwed shut to keep from bawling.

Between the two of them, it’s usually Stan who clams up like this when he’s upset. Patty _loves_ to cry. She thinks it’s cleansing, she thinks it’s cathartic, and she does it often. She once burst into tears at the first bite of a particularly delicious peach cobbler. Stan had been understandably freaked until Patty explained through her sniffles that _she’s really sorry, this cobbler is just really fucking good._

Stan had laughed so hard that he cried right along with her.

She sits there, in that awful hospital chair holding her phone to her ear with white knuckles even though Maureen has long since hung up. She can’t straighten her fingers. They’re trembling and stiff. Stained pink. Darker red sits in the creases and cracks of her knuckles. The edges of her nails. A gruesome border to the chipping yellow polish.

Patty’s always thought that level of panic, that level of fear, felt something like floating. As if someone tipped you on your axis and you weren’t quite aligned with the world anymore. Just slightly off. Leaning a little bit too far forward and if you weren’t careful, you’d fall and crack your face against the ground. But you never do. And somehow the hangtime is worse than the anticipated crunch of cartilage on linoleum.

The longer she sits, she tilts further and further. She’s spinning.

Soon, the doctor asks for her. His face looks grim.

By the time she leaves the hospital, it’s nearly three in the morning. Maureen drives her home. Sits her on the toilet seat in the guest bathroom and helps her set up to take a shower, gently instructing her through every step. _Here’s your shampoo, Patty. Here’s your conditioner. Here’s a washcloth, I put some soap on it for you._

Patty scrubs at her hands until they’re raw. Her knees as well, where the blood soaked through her jeans.

Only when she’s towelled off and been wrapped up in her fluffy bathrobe, does Patty realize that her bloodstained clothes are gone. Maureen takes her hand and brings her to the guest room, climbing into bed with her like they did when they were kids. Neither of them sleep. Maureen just holds her as she watches the red numbers on the digital clock creep along.

Around five, she starts to cry.

And she doesn’t stop for a long time.

But Patty does what she’s always done best. She adapts.

She sits shiva and takes a walk around the block once it’s done. She goes to the therapist that her mother recommended. She sleeps in the guest bedroom. She helps her students crimp strips of green construction paper to make them look like seaweed. She goes to temple. She refills the birdfeeder.

Her dad has always said, _Nothing phases Patty-Cakes. Our Pat just goes with the flow, smile on her face._

But Patty doesn’t want to adapt to this. She doesn’t want to get used to a life without Stanley Uris in it.

Now, it’s been a month and one week. And she’s almost run out of the frozen casseroles delivered to her by neighbors and coworkers and family members.

In an effort to make them last longer, she sleeps in until noon on Saturday, which is always the most pleasant way to skip breakfast. For lunch, she roots around the latest fruit baskets to pick out the remaining clementines.

They’re her favorite. She messily peels one after another, the juice cool and sticky as it coats her fingers.

(It’s the exact opposite of _thick and hot and syrupy and slick and red red red all over her hands all over him all over everything all over all over all over–)_

They’re her favorite, but she eats so many that her stomach hurts. She wonders if her skin will turn orange.

It’s the kind of thing that she’d ask Stanley.

He’d huff that quiet laugh of his. He’d kiss her temple and say, _You’re thinking of carrots, babylove._ He’d bring her a tums to ease her stomach.

She rests her head on the kitchen table, haloed by the sweet smelling rinds, and sleeps for another hour.

* * *

_Last year, I brought up questions  
about mending after loss  
and all orange could bring was  
eye spasms and stomach aches.  
But now the only pain left is left  
in rinds, and there are plenty of ways  
to remove it from the heart._

* * *

Richie is so fucking tired.

He had flown back to LA with Bill, been dropped off at his apartment with a plea to _call,_ and to _visit._ But at the prospect of doing anything other than crawling into bed and staying there for a very long time, Richie was concerned that his brain might finally turn to mush and leak out of his ears.

He doesn’t think he’ll be doing much of anything.

But he doesn’t want to worry his friends. He loves them. So he promises Bill, texts the others to let them know that he got home safe, that he still _remembers._ And then he curls up under his comforter and cries so hard that he starts to hyperventilate.

His chest burns. His head aches. It’s good.

It’s easier when the hurt is physical, instead of this nebulous, all-consuming thing.

He doesn’t know how, but eventually he falls asleep. He only knows that he’s fallen asleep because he is rudely awakened by his manager barging into his apartment.

“Hello, Tozier! If you’re here, I hate you! If you’re not here, I also still hate you!” Steve calls into what he must assume is an empty apartment.

Richie sighs. He should get up. He should tell Steve where he’s been, what’s been going on. That he wasn’t on a bender and he hasn’t relapsed. That actually, something much worse has happened. But getting out from under his comforter sounds like the most difficult task Richie’s ever been faced with.

So he just kind of lies there until Steve pokes his head in, says, “Oh shit, you’re really here! What the fuck, man? Do you have any idea how much deep shit we’re in?”

He sits up with a groan, intending to give Steve a very censored rundown of the last couple days. But he opens his mouth to speak, and the worst possible thing happens.

Richie fucking bursts into tears. Awful, body-wracking sobs. In front of fucking _Steve._

If he weren’t so distraught, he’d take the moment to appreciate the fact that he’s never seen Steve so shocked. Sure, Steve has seen him drunk off his ass, high out of his mind, vomiting. But not once has Steve seen Richie cry. Or even legitimately upset, at least past the point that he couldn’t cover it up with poorly timed jokes. _Richie is Mr. Okay, Richie really just doesn’t care._

Steve approaches the bed like he’s trying not to scare off a frightened animal, or step on a landmine. He sits next to Richie on the bed and woodenly throws an arm around his shoulder. Quietly goes, “Shit, man. Just breathe, okay?”

Steve may be an asshole, but he’s not heartless. (Richie understands why he hired him now. He met this short, angry man with dark eyes and everything to prove and thought, _I don’t know, I guess I just trust him.)_

Eventually, Richie’s sobs peter out and he pitifully croaks, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, Rich. But what the fuck happened?”

Richie takes another deep breath, and prays to whoever’s fucking listening that he won’t start crying again.

“Um. Right before I went on stage at my last show, I got a call that one of my childhood best friends died. And so, all of my friends from back then, we all got back together in our hometown for the funeral. And while we were there, one of them died in an accident. A– um. A building collapse.”

The reality of it hangs in the air for a moment. Impossibly, Steve looks even more shocked.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

Steve shifts on the bed to face Richie completely, “You know you could have told me, right? I’m not a monster, and we could have worked something out with the venues. You’ve been through hell, Rich, anyone would understand.”

“I know, I just– I’m sorry, I really haven’t been thinking straight.”

Steve squeezes his shoulder, “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. If it’s alright with you, I’m going to get a statement ready, just to let people know that you’re taking some time off, I’ll keep it vague as shit. And you’re gonna get some rest, however long you need. And we’ll just… take it day by day. Alright, man?”

He nods, his eyes filling with tears once more. Steve mutters something about Richie needing to hydrate before he gets a headache and ducks out into the kitchen to grab a glass of water.

Richie remembers very abruptly that Steve’s younger brother was killed in a boating accident a while back. At the time, Richie had been spending most of his days severely doped up, and only vaguely remembers Steve disappearing home for a month or so, returning harsher and angrier than ever before. He’d occasionally vanish into public restrooms, return red-eyed and blotchy before chugging a bottle of water. Popping some ibuprofen.

Richie definitely hadn’t thought much of it at the time. He hadn’t been thinking much of anything.

When Steve returns, places the glass on the bedside table and hovers kind of awkwardly, Richie finally climbs out of bed. He pulls Steve into a tight hug and says, “Thank you.”

Steve pats his back, in the manly way that men do when they’ve decided that they’re feeling too much, and says, “Anytime, man. For real.”

They both sniff and wipe at their faces.

Steve promises to stop by often to check in on him, Richie says that he can stop by the _normal_ amount since he knows that Bill will already be stopping by every day. Then that turns into a whole thing because Steve wants to know how Richie is friends with _Bill Fucking Denbrough_ of all people, and Richie’s fairly certain that even though everything is awful right now, he just might be okay.

But that was then. And this is now.

And right now, Richie is going grocery shopping for the first time in a month.

He’d mainly been subsisting off of take-out (anything but Chinese, he really can’t face the fortune cookies) and whatever junk food he’d first grab on rushed Seven-Eleven trips. And he’s so nauseous all the time that he’s barely managing one gross meal a day anyway, and it shows. His clothes hang off him and his face is looking a little gaunt. He’s already one scarecrow-looking motherfucker, and this is certainly not helping. Steve and Bill are looking more and more concerned each time that they stop by.

He’s half-way through a cup of instant noodles when he’s suddenly struck by the realization that _Eddie would hate this._

He’d give Richie hell for the way that he takes care of his body. For the fatty foods, and the beer, and the cigarettes. He sees a vivid image in his mind’s eye of Eddie snatching the noodles away from him and dumping them down the garbage disposal. Pulling him onto his feet and out the door of his apartment, promising that _we’re gonna feed you a fucking vegetable if it kills you._

He dumps out the noodles and resolves to make himself a stir-fry. To buy some instant oatmeal to goad himself into eating breakfast tomorrow. Maybe some of those chips made out of vegetables, Eds probably went nuts over those.

In his sudden burst of motivation, he doesn’t give a second thought to the fact that he must look like shit, grabbing his keys and wallet, and marching right out of his apartment in a pair of flannel pants and a grubby-looking sweatshirt.

This is his first mistake.

The grocery store isn’t too far and getting some fresh air might be nice, so Richie decides that he’ll walk. Since he’s forgotten to don the stereotypical cap and sunglasses to hide his face, some teenager spots him and points him out to his friends.

These are, collectively, his second and third mistakes.

By the time he exits the store with a few bags stuffed full of what he assumes would be Eddie-approved food, he’s feeling pretty good about himself. He feels like Eddie would be proud of him, and it’s making him a little bit emotional, so he’s sniffling a little bit. Eyes watery and cheeks flushed.

Outside is a small gaggle of paparazzi. Looking back, it might only be three or four.

But they all descend on Richie at once, cameras flashing, shouting questions, and he feels as if he’s being suffocated.

“Richie! What went wrong at your last show?”

“Some sources are saying that you relapsed. Had an overdose, is that true? Been in rehab?”

“You aren’t looking well, Richie. Are you high right now? You know, you’ve lost a lot of weight.”

He’s got the bags in his hands, so he can’t block his face. He’s feeling a little bit dizzy with panic, combined with the fact that he hasn’t really eaten all day, he begins to sway a little bit on his feet.

They walk with him as he tries to push past them. One of his grocery bags splits open and spills produce all over the sidewalk. A jar of tomato sauce shatters, spilling bloody and red across the ground.

They don’t stop. _All he wanted was to make some fucking dinner. All he wanted was to be a person that Eddie Kaspbrak would be proud of._

He throws the other bags down. He yells, “Please, just _get the fuck away from me!”_ He’s horrified when his voice cracks, and he can feel deep in his chest that he’s about to start crying.

For just a moment, they pause in surprise. On a precipice. But then one snaps a picture of Richie standing flushed and tearful over his fallen groceries, like some grotesque giant looming over the remains of the village he just crushed beneath his massive feet. And Richie is _fucking done._

“You don’t know _shit!_ None of you know a _goddamn_ thing about me or my life. You’re no better than that fucking clown, I swear to god. I don’t owe any of you jack shit. I’m not drunk! I’m not on coke! Two of my best friends died and it fucking _killed me!”_

By the end of it, he’s openly sobbing. The paps are legitimately shocked now. The same one as before snaps one more picture of Richie’s snotty face and he finally storms off, leaving his groceries where they’ve fallen.

Once he’s a block or so away, he ducks into a small bodega to wait while he calls an Uber. Because he really hasn’t eaten all day, and he _really_ thinks he might faint.

The reality of what he’s done finally sinks in, and he covers his face with a groan. They’d _finally_ stopped talking about him. Stopped taking bets on when he’d OD. All he’s done is made it worse _and_ he doesn’t have dinner.

God, he should really eat.

He glances around the bodega for anything mildly healthy. There’s a small basket of clementines. He grabs three and pays for them at the register, slipping them into the pockets of his sweatshirt just as his Uber arrives.

He remembers being ten or eleven and showing Eddie that if you bit into an orange slice and pulled your lips over the edges of the rind, it gave you a sunny orange grin. He immediately spat it out, stuck the slimy slice in Eddie’s face and crowed, _You should give it a try, Eds!_

He had recoiled and socked Richie in the arm, going on about mono and _do you know how many germs there are in the human mouth, Richie?_ and _don’t fucking call me Eds, dipshit._

The clementines are smaller in his hands than the orange was, but look much the same. It makes him feel as if he was that much littler back then, the way his hands dwarf the smaller fruit.

He’s grown. Things are different.

He gets back to his apartment and sits down on the floor, resting his back against the front door. He peels the clementines and eats them one by one. They’re sweet and cold. And he thinks that Eddie would be proud of him for eating a fruit.

He’d yell at him about not washing his hands first, though. And Richie would laugh.

* * *

_I won’t do it, though. Instead, I will  
mock the break with more breaking  
and eat all the clementines again._

* * *

The last flake of Patty’s yellow nail polish has finally chipped off.

Stan always painted her nails for her.

When they were twenty-three, he’d come across her, cross-legged on the bathroom floor in their first apartment, cursing over a bottle of shimmery blue because she kept flooding her cuticles. He lingers in the doorway, watching with vague amusement as she struggles.

“Can I help you, mister? Or are you just gonna– _fuck._ Gonna stand there and– _fucking shit.”_

“I could give it a shot. If you want.”

She knows even before looking up at him that he’s entirely serious, but she still pins him with her gaze and narrows her eyes in consideration before chirping, “Sure.”

He’s unfairly good at it.

(To be fair, she should have known. He is the most unbelievably precise person she’s ever met. It’s why he’s the better baker and Patty’s the better cook.)

Despite her gratitude, Patty spends the entire process fervently asserting that she always painted Maureen’s nails when they were kids, and was _actually_ quite skilled, she just can’t do her own.

“I’m sure, babylove,” he smirks as he finishes up with a final swipe on her pinky.

“I’ll fucking prove it, Uris.”

He lets out, honest to god, _giggles_ at the image of a furious Patty, flapping her hands wildly in an attempt to get the polish to dry faster, before she snatches one of his hands and the first color she lands on, which happens to be orange.

The effect of her fury is diminished slightly when she pauses, returning the orange and deliberating over her collection to select a color that will better match Stanley’s eyes.

She paints his nails a lovely shade of bottle green, and she does it _immaculately._ Top coat and all.

“Get _fucked,_ my love. How does it feel to be wrong _and_ have an amazing manicure?”

He leans forward to kiss the center of her forehead and very sincerely says, “It feels just wonderful.”

Sitting there, on the floor of their bathroom, each cross-legged with their knees meeting between them, Patty thinks she just might spill over with how much she fucking loves him.

She loves the subtle expressions in his face. Her mother has described him as _stoic_ and _mysterious,_ but that’s just because she can’t read him like Patty can. They can have entire conversations in the quirks of their eyebrows until their friends tell them that _it gets to a point where it’s just creepy, you two._

But right now? Patty smiles at him. And his face just splits open. It’s one of his rare, face-consuming grins and it’s Patty’s favorite of Stan’s smiles. His eyes scrunch up and his nose crinkles and Patty loves him, loves him, loves him.

She climbs into his lap, sitting in the gap of his crossed legs and wrapping her own around his middle, resting her feet on the floor at his tailbone, her knees on either side of his rib cage. She ducks her face into his chest and feels his arms circle around her back.

“You know I love you so much, right? So much. Forever and ever,” She says against his chest, directly to his heart.

“I know. I always know.”

He tilts her face upwards. Kisses her forehead. Her eyelids. Her cheeks. Her nose. Her chin. Her lips.

He punctuates each one. _I love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love you._

He wears the green nail polish for the two weeks that it lasts. To work and to the grocery store and to the bar. Patty knows then that she’s going to marry him. (Well, she already knew. But this just confirms it once more.)

Since then, every once and a while when Patty would ask Stan to paint her nails, once he finished he would peruse the bottles and select one for himself. And god, she _loves_ him.

The last flake of Patty’s yellow nail polish has finally chipped off.

And Patty doesn’t know what she’ll fucking do.

She goes out into the backyard, into the cool dusk, and lies flat on her back in the grass. The sleeves of Stan’s old NYU sweatshirt, lately a permanent fixture in Patty’s wardrobe, pulled down and fisted in her hands.

There was always _something._ Something heavy that Stan carried with him.

There was his (for lack of a better word) _normal_ anxieties. And then there was something else.

The nightmares that he’d wake with no recollection of. The occasions when his eyes would glaze over, cloudy and lost, and the terror that would seize him after being shaken from his daze. His scars; the small, equidistant pocks bordering his face and the thick, slice of a mark in his palm. The research she had done without telling him, unveiling the many disappearances and violent crimes that took place in his childhood hometown.

He confided in her once, voice shaking, that he felt there was a deep, black pit in the corner of his brain. As if something had been unceremoniously chopped at and removed.

She held him and tried to pretend that it didn’t terrify her; Stanley walking around, weighed down by this awful, nameless thing.

They had tried therapy, medication, the works. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it didn’t.

_That was the nature of these types of things,_ they had reasoned.

But there was a difference between Stan’s anxiety and the terrible darkness that sometimes gripped him. It feels foolish to say, but Patty is sure of it.

She tilts her face towards the sky, tears already leaking from the corners of her eyes and down her temples, into her hair.

“Oh, Stanley, my love. I don’t understand. I don’t understand, baby.”

She wipes at her face with the cuffs of her sweatshirt.

“You know I love you so much, right? So much. Forever and ever.”

* * *

_I only say “again” because_  
I don’t know how to say  
I never stopped.

* * *

Some time later, across the country, Richie Tozier gets a call from Mike Hanlon. And something is set into motion.

**Author's Note:**

> ON GOD PATTY BABYLOVE URIS WILL BE HAPPY SOON
> 
> yell at me on [tumblr](https://squaaash.tumblr.com) and [reblog](https://squaaash.tumblr.com/post/190564409674/the-side-effects-of-eating-too-many-clementines) this fic if you like <3


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